This volume fits the activities of the Ordnance Department into the
larger pictures of procurement and supply to be found in The Army and
Economic Mobilization and the two volumes on Global Logistics and
Strategy. The story focuses on the particular items that ordnance officers
were tasked to procure and supply: artillery and small arms, and ammunition
for both; fire-control instruments; combat vehicles, including the tank;
the transport vehicles that put the Army and its supplies on motor-driven
wheels; and spare parts and maintenance for all of these. How it provided
and maintained such vital instruments of war is of interest to all who
depended on them for effectiveness in combat, and not less so to employers
and employees in the great American industries, such as the automotive,
whose plants and skills the Army drew into its service to aid in producing
these instruments.

This volume complements Planning Munitions for War, which describes
the development of Ordnance Department weapons. The section on procurement
in the present volume centers on the department's Industrial Division,
the manufacturing arsenals, and the district offices; the section dealing
with supply concentrates on the Field Service Division and the depots and
changes in the depot system introduced to improve delivery all over the
globe of the right kinds of munitions in the right quantities.

At the outset the authors describe the problems of the department in
launching the munitions program of 1940 and in the basic task of computing
requirements. They examine the need for new construction, both of depot
and manufacturing facilities, as a factor in lengthening the gap between
the decision to rearm and readiness to deploy adequately armed combat forces.
They give full weight to the strong ties developed over the years between
the Ordnance Department and industry through the procurement districts,
the manufacturing arsenals, and the Army Ordnance Association and describe,
in nontechnical language, wartime manufacturing methods and new techniques
of production. In a succession of "commodity chapters" the volume
explores the most serious problems that the department had to overcome
in procuring or producing a class of equipment, such as artillery, tanks,
ammunition of various types, and vehicles, repeatedly emphasizing the critical
importance of machine tools for the production of fighting equipment. The
rest of the volume tells how the department stored and distributed the
enormous quantities and varieties of munitions produced and gives particular
attention to problems of cataloging and stock control.

Key topics:
1. Requirements and the difficulties attending the establishment of firm,
long-range production objectives (Ch. IV).
2. The Ordnance Department's experience with conflicting demands for mass
production and for improvements in design (Chs. V-XI).
3. Arsenals: their role as repositories of production knowledge and as
centers for overhaul and modification of materiel in storage (Chs. V-IX).
4. Ordnance experience with the problem of spare parts, especially for
tanks and trucks (Ch. XIII).
5. Measures to regulate and speed up the movement of ordnance from factory
to depot to troops (Chs. XVII, XVIII).
6. Devices, such as standardization of nomenclature and parts numbering

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(especially important for spare parts), stock control, and use of electrical
accounting machines in reporting depot stocks, to bring about more efficient
stockage and distribution of ordnance materiel (Chs. XIX, XX).
7. The creation of ordnance troop units suitable for supply, repair, and
preventive maintenance and the problem of working out effective management
of maintenance shops in the zone of interior through the service command
system set up by the Army Service Forces (Ch. XXII).